Consumers/cooks have great difficulty in trying to separate a round or square frozen block of hamburger patties using conventional utensils and tools such as knives, cleavers, screw drivers, chisels, metal wedges and the like. In trying to separate these frozen hamburger patties with the aforementioned conventional utensils and tools the user often injures his/her hands or fingers; and more often damages the individual hamburger patties such that the hamburger patty is marred, broken, contaminated and/or inedible, and not readily usable for frying, broiling, barbecuing, and the like.
Normal procedures have the frozen block of hamburger patties completely defrosted such that the individual hamburger patty is easily separated by a knife, spatula, hamburger flipper and the like. This procedure leads to many of the individual patties not being used for cooking, as these hamburger patties cannot be refrozen for sanitary reasons. In addition, these individual defrosted hamburger patties tend to break in half, become overly bloody and messy to handle; and again inedible and possibly contaminated and not readily usable for frying, broiling, barbecuing and the like. Thus, the consumer has wasted valuable food product for future use.
There remains a need for a simple, light-weight, portable hand-operated separator that will easily and quickly separate a single individualized hamburger patty from a frozen hamburger block having therein a plurality of individual hamburger patties that are frozen together without causing any injury to the user or causing any damage to the individualized hamburger patty that was separated from the frozen hamburger block.